The background description includes information that may be useful in understanding the present invention. It is not an admission that any of the information provided herein is prior art or relevant to the presently claimed invention, or that any publication specifically or implicitly referenced is prior art.
Traditionally, seat display units (SDUs) disposed in passenger aircraft and other vehicles require they be manually tilted by passengers when the seat in which they are disposed is reclined by another passenger. Examples of such display units are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,407,227, 8,777,310, and 9,016,627 and Canada patent no. 2652584.
Airlines and seat vendors prefer to eliminate tilting SDUs because the SDUs can pinch passenger fingers, can be ugly, and can be hard to make secure enough to pass force-impact testing that is generally required for the SDUs to be used in an aircraft setting. In addition, seats and SDUs are usually designed separately, which leads to a lesser experience for the passengers and sometimes, an unpleasant visual. Further, the most damaged part of an SDU is its touch screen, and in current devices, airlines typically have to return or replace the entire SDU to have the touch screen replaced.
To eliminate the need to manually tilt the display unit, automatically tilting display units have also been attempted—see, e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 8,308,237. However, such display units utilize electrically driven components to tilt the display, increasing the complexity and number of components and resulting in additional weight and higher likelihood of maintenance requirements.
Another option to avoid the requirement of a manually-tiltable display unit is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,822,812, which discusses the use of a fixed display unit where the image itself is manipulated to account for seat recline. However, such modification for each seat can require significant computational power leading to the potential for delays or lag time in the video being viewed which could result in a less than desirable experience for passengers.
Thus, there is still a need for providing a display unit that allows for replacement of the touch screen when non-operational, while eliminating the need for manually tilting the touch screen when the seat is reclined.